Before all the “mutiny” precautions, some of the workers he had seen had worn relatively small, compact handguns at their belts. He had supposed they used them for plinking or shooting game. Terl still wore his—a rather bigger one—but the others seemed to have stopped.
Jonnie wondered how far he could trust Ker. The “midget” was definitely Terl’s creature. But from some of the tales Ker had chattered on with, he was distinctly criminal: he told how he had rigged certain games of chance, how he had looted ore boxes “as a joke,” how he had gotten a female to believe her father needed money and “relayed it for her.”
One day they were waiting for a machine to be idle so it could be used in practice and Jonnie decided to make a test. He still had the two disks he had gotten in the Great Village. He knew now that one was a silvery coin and the other a gold coin.
He took the silver coin out of his pocket and began flipping it.
“What’s that?” Ker wanted to know. Jonnie gave it to him and Ker scratched it with a talon. “I dug some of these up once in a wrecked town on the southern continent,” said Ker. “You must have gotten this locally, though.”
“Why?” said Jonnie, alert that perhaps Ker could read English letters.
“It’s fake,” said Ker. “An alloy of copper with a nickel-silver plating. A real coin—and I saw some once—is solid silver.” He handed it back, losing interest.
Jonnie took out the yellow coin and started flipping it.
Ker caught it in the air before it could fall back into Jonnie’s hand. His interest was sudden and intense. “Hey, where did you get this?” Ker dented the edge with a talon tip and looked at it closely.
“Why?” said Jonnie innocently. “Is it worth something?”
A very sly look came into Ker’s eye. The coin he was holding and trying to be casual about was worth four thousand credits! Gold, alloyed just enough to be used in coinage without undue wear. Ker steadied his hand and looked very, very casual. “Where’d you get this?”
“Well,” said Jonnie, “it came from a very dangerous place.”
“There are more of them?” Ker was quivering a little bit. He was holding in his paw three months’ pay! All in one little coin. And as an employee he could legally possess it as a “souvenir.” On Psychlo it could buy a wife. He tried to remember how many coins it took for them to cease to be “souvenirs” and become company property. Ten? Thirteen? So long as they were old and obviously mintage, not some fake made by a miner.
“The place is so dangerous one couldn’t go there without at least a belt gun.”
Ker looked at him searchingly. “Are you trying to get me to give you a belt gun?”
“Would I do something like that?”
“Yes,” said Ker. This animal was very, very quick on machines. Quicker in fact than Psychlo trainees.
Ker looked longingly at the gold coin or medallion or whatever it had been. He said nothing. Then he handed it back to Jonnie and just sat there, his amber eyes shadowed in the depths of his breathe-gas dome.
Jonnie took the coin back. “I’m careless with things like this. I can’t buy anything, you know. I keep it in a hole just to the right of the cage door as you come in.”
Ker sat there for a while. Then he said, “The next machine is ready.”
But that night, while Terl was making his rounds of the minesite and was distant from his viewing screen, the gold coin disappeared from the hole where Jonnie had put it, and in the morning, when Jonnie dug there, covering the action with his body, a small handgun and spare charges were in the hole instead.
Jonnie had a gun.
4
A remaining hurdle was knowledge.
The Chinkos were good teachers, and they could stack real learning onto a disk and get it assimilated like lightning flashes. But basically they had been working for Psychlos and trying to teach Psychlos, and they omitted a lot of things that Psychlos either already knew or could not have much interest in. This left gaps.
Jonnie had picked up inferences that there was uranium in the mountains to the west. Mostly he guessed this because no active mining ever seemed to have been undertaken there by the Psychlos. From the accident he had witnessed and for other reasons, he suspected uranium was deadly to the Psychlos. But he didn’t know for sure and he didn’t know how.
He was utterly dismayed, in studying the text on electronic chemistry, to find there were many, many different atomic formations of uranium.
Sitting at his fire, grinding away at texts and the instruction machine alternately, Jonnie was disturbed by the ground-shake that always preceded Terl. It was simply the monster’s nightly rounds.
“What are you studying so hard, animal?” asked Terl, looming over him.
Jonnie decided to plunge, to take a chance. He looked the many feet up to Terl’s mask. “It’s the mountains to the west,” said Jonnie.
Terl looked at him suspiciously for a little while.
“There’s not much in here about them,” said Jonnie.
Terl was still suspicious. What had this animal guessed?
“I was born and raised there,” said Jonnie. “There’s data on mountains everywhere else on the planet but hardly any on those right there.” He pointed to where faint moonlight shone on the bold snowcaps. “The Chinkos took a lot of books out of the library. Man-books. Are they here?”
“Oh,” snorted Terl in relief. “Man-books. Ha.”
Terl was rather more pleased than otherwise. This fitted into his own concentrations. He left and came back shortly with a battered table and a disorderly armload of books that avalanched down on it. They were frail books, very ancient, and some broke their backs or came apart with his mishandling.
“I am nothing but an animal attendant,” said Terl. “If mauling through this gibberish makes you happy, be happy.” He paused at the cage door after he went out and locked it. “Just remember one thing, animal. The junk you’ll find in those man-books didn’t have anything in them to defeat Psychlos.” Then he laughed. “Probably lots of recipes on how to prepare raw rat, though.” He rumbled off to the compound, his laughter fading.
Jonnie touched the books reverently. And then with hope he began to inspect them. They mostly concerned mining. His first find was a text on chemistry. It contained a table of “elements” that gave the atomic formation of every element man had known.
With a sudden puzzlement he grabbed the Psychlo text on electronic chemistry. It too had a table on the atomic formation of elements.
He put them side by side in the flickering firelight.
They were different!
Both tables were apparently based on the “periodic law,” by which the properties of the chemical elements recur periodically when the elements are arranged in increasing order of their atomic numbers. But there were elements on the man-table that did not occur on the Psychlo table. And the Psychlo table had dozens more elements. The Psychlo table also had many more gases listed and did not seem to specialize in oxygen.
Jonnie floundered through it, not too adept at getting the abbreviations related to the substances, more used to reading Psychlo than English.
Yes, the Psychlos listed radium and even gave it an atomic number of eighty-eight, but they noted it as a rare element. And they had dozens of elements numbered and listed above eighty-eight.
Nothing made it plainer than the difference in these tables that he was dealing with an alien planet in an alien universe. Some of the metals were compatible. But on the whole the distribution was different and even atomic formation seemed at variance.
At length he suspected that both tables were imperfect and incomplete and, with a spinning head, gave it up. He was a man of action, not a Chinko!
He turned to his next huge question. Were there uranium mines in the mountains?
At length he found some charts and listings. He had been certain that there must be uranium mines—man-mines—in those mountains. But all he found were notations that where they had exi
sted they were mined out.
What? No uranium mines? No active ones, anyway.
Yet he was dead certain that there must be uranium in those mountains. Otherwise, why would the Psychlos avoid them? Maybe they just thought there was. No, there must be uranium in those mountains.
Some of his plans began to crumble at the edges and he fell into something like despair.
He began to search in the books, looking for any references at all to uranium.
And then he hit, as Ker would say, pay dirt of a sort.
It was a book on mine toxicology, a subject he made out as “poisons in mines affecting miners.” And there it was in the index: “Uranium; radiation poisoning.”
For the next half-hour he struggled through the entry. It seemed that you had better damn well be clothed in lead shielding when you fooled around with radium or uranium or radiation. All sorts of terrible things happened if you weren’t. Rashes, hair falling out, burns, blood changes . . .
And then he had it: people bombarded with radiation experienced changes in their genes and chromosomes, and birth defects and sterility resulted.
That was what was wrong with his people.
That was why children seldom came and why those that did were often imperfect at birth.
That was the reason for the lethargy of some of them.
And that could also be the “red sickness.” And the crumbling away of his father’s bones.
It was all there. It described exactly what was happening to his people. Why they did not multiply.
There was radiation in the village valley!
He went back hurriedly to the mine maps. No, there was not even a worked-out uranium mine anywhere around the village.
But radiation was what it was. The symptoms were unmistakable.
He knew now why the Psychlos stayed away from there. But if there were no mines, where was the radiation coming from? The sun? No, not that. Goats on the higher ridges had no trouble multiplying and he had never seen a deformed goat.
Well, he had an answer of sorts. It was not a clean-cut one. There was radiation but no mines.
It struck him abruptly that man must have had a way of detecting radiation; he seemed to know so much about it. Eventually he found that, too. It was called a “Geiger counter” after somebody named “Geiger,” who was born and died on dates that Jonnie had no trace or inkling of. It seemed that radiation or “ionizing particles,” if present, passed through a gas. The radiation generated a current in the gas that made a needle react. Radiation somehow generated a current in certain gases.
The schematic diagrams were unintelligible to him until he found a table that gave the abbreviations. He could then translate them across into Psychlo, which he did laboriously. He wondered whether he could make a Geiger counter. He decided, given the Psychlo electronics shop, that he could. But after he escaped, that wouldn’t be available. Despair began to creep in on him.
He finally put the books away and in the small hours fell into an exhausted sleep. He had nightmares. Chrissie mauled and smashed to bits. His people wasted and truly extinct. And the world of the Psychlos come alive and laughing at him.
5
But it wasn’t the whole world of the Psychlos laughing. It was Terl.
Midmorning sunlight filled the cage as Jonnie awoke. Terl was standing at the second table, turning over the man-books and laughing.
Jonnie sat up in his robes.
“You finished with these, animal?”
Jonnie went over to the artificial pond and washed his face. A month back he had persuaded Terl to keep a trickle running in so he could get clean water at the intake. It was cold and refreshed him.
There was a shattering crash in the air and for a moment he thought something had blown up. But it was only the recon drone passing overhead.
For some days now it had been making midmorning sweeps. Ker had explained to him what it was. It was an ore-detection, activity-surveillance craft, capable of taking continuous pictures. It was regulated by remote control.
All his life Jonnie had seen such craft overhead and had supposed they were natural phenomena such as meteors or the sun and moon. But those had passed every few days and this one was passing daily. The old ones did not rumble in the distance as they approached and did not make an explosion as they went by. This one did. Ker hadn’t really known why, but it had to do with speed. They were very fast. You couldn’t turn one in the air or stop one. You could only guide it, and it had to go all the way around the planet to get back. So this one—if it was the same one—was circling the planet daily. The harsh boom was very unpleasant.
Terl looked up at it and then carefully ignored it. Minesite personnel didn’t like it.
“Why every day?” said Jonnie, looking up at it. It was an element in his escape planning. It only took pictures but that would be enough.
“I said,” snarled Terl, “are you finished with these books?”
The recon drone was fading, its rumble losing itself across the eastern plains. Its path had been from the mountains.
Jonnie made a breakfast of cold meat and water. Terl stacked the books up in his arms and went to the cage door.
Terl halted, indifferently. “If you’re so keen on data about those mountains,” said Terl, “there’s a whole relief map of them in the library of that town up north. You want to look at it?”
Instantly alert, Jonnie nevertheless kept on with his breakfast. An accommodating Terl always has something else in mind. But this was a chance Jonnie had scarcely dared hope for.
In his planning he had gone over ways to get Terl to take him out in the car. It would be a simple matter to throw a door catch, swing a blast of air into the car, hit the emergency stop button, and hold a gun on Terl. Desperate, but it was a chance.
“I got nothing to do today,” said Terl. “Your machine training has ended. We might run up to the town. Look at that relief map. Do a little hunting. Maybe look some more for your horse.”
A rambling Terl was not within Jonnie’s experience. Did the monster know something?
“I want to show you something, anyways,” said Terl. “So get your things together and I’ll be by in about an hour and we’ll take a ride. I’ve got to check some things. I’ll be back. Be ready, animal.”
Jonnie scrambled. This was a bit premature and it upset his planning, but he looked on it as a heaven-sent chance. He had to get away and get to his people, both to stop Chrissie, if she attempted to keep her promise, and to move the village to a safer place. There were only two weeks left before the constellation returned to its place.
He put the small gun in his belt pouch, put the metal cutter alongside his ankle, packed a supply of smoked beef. He dressed in buckskin.
When the hour was up, a vehicle rumbled into sight and stopped. Jonnie stared at it, wondering what was going on. This was not the Mark III tank. It was a simple equipment truck normally used for transporting machinery. It had an enclosed, pressurized cab. The back was large and open, surrounded by stakes. Its only similarity to a tank was that it had no wheels but skimmed a varying distance up to three feet above ground.
Then Jonnie realized that this might work to his advantage. It had no heat-seekers, no guns.
Terl got out and opened the cage. “Throw your things into the back, animal. And ride in the back.” He unfastened the leash and boosted Jonnie over the tailgate. He took out a pocket welder and fastened the leash to the cab.
“This way,” said Terl, “I won’t have to smell those hides!” He was laughing when he got into the cab, took off his mask, and turned on its system. Suddenly Jonnie realized he had no way of immobilizing Terl—he couldn’t open the door on him.
The truck skimmed away. It was slower than the tanks and it was not as well cushioned against the ground, for it was now running very underloaded.
Jonnie held on, his head ducked below the forward cab level. The eighty-mile-an-hour wind of passage roared over his head and against the truck’s upri
ght stakes.
He was thinking fast. Somehow he could play this so as to get the truck as well. Its controls weren’t any different, of that he was certain from the quick glance he had had. All Psychlo controls were simple levers and buttons.
What a relief it would be to get rid of this collar. His heart was thudding expectantly. Once again, if he made no mistakes, he would be free!
6
It was no more than 1:00 when they thudded to a halt outside the library in the town. Terl got out, shaking the vehicle with his weight.
He was still conversational when he unfastened the leash. “See anything of your horse?”
“Not a thing,” said Jonnie.
“Too bad, animal. This truck is the very thing to carry a horse, or ten horses for that matter.”
Terl went to the library door and with a tool undid the lock. He gave the leash a yank and sent Jonnie in ahead of him.
The place was a quiet tomb of dust, the interior the same as Jonnie had last seen it. Terl was looking around.
“Ha!” said Terl. “So that’s how you got in before!” He was pointing to the disturbed dust under a window and the unchanged impressions of footprints across the floor. “You even put the guard screens back! Well,” he added, looking around, “let’s find data on the western mountains.”
Jonnie was aware of the changes in himself. Those blotches of white he had seen before were signs, very plain and easy to read. He saw that his previous visit had occurred beside the Children’s Section and that the shelves he had first approached were marked Child Educational.
“Wait a minute,” said Terl. “I don’t think you know how to read a library index. Come over here, animal.” He yanked on the leash he had let run long. He was standing by stacks of small drawers. He bent over and opened one. “According to the Chinkos, every book has a card and the cards are in here in these drawers. Alphabetical. Got it?”
Jonnie looked at the drawers. Terl had pulled one out that was all Q. The cards were musty and grayed but readable. “Anything there about mountains?” said Terl.
Tense as he was, Jonnie had to repress a smile. Here was more proof that Terl couldn’t read English. “The drawer you have there is about vehicles,” said Jonnie.